#Super metroid randomizer download software#
#Super metroid randomizer download download#

“Generally I’ll have a path in my head of what I’m going to do, depending on my current item set or whatever,” Laso said during a recent phone interview. The crossover points are predetermined, but all of the items are random, so playing through the ROM optimally means knowing exactly which paths to follow based on which items you get. To beat this crossover, Laso explained, you need to finish both Super Metroid and Link to the Past, zipping back and forth between the two games as you get specific items that will help you unlock specific paths.

In other words, it’d be possible to mash Link to the Past and Super Metroid together as a single Super Nintendo game. If they had overlapped, they wouldn’t be able to share a ROM file, but because they each took up different parts of the SNES memory, they could work side by side. Link to the Past and Super Metroid were both coded to occupy different groups of these segments, perhaps coincidentally. The Super Nintendo’s memory bank, he explained to me recently, is split up into 256 segments. The idea stuck, and as he was playing around with ROM files for each game, Backmark discovered something fortuitous. “Just romhack the two games together, and when you go through certain doors you switch games.” “Now we’re talking,” Backmark wrote, according to a Discord log he passed along. The speedrunning communities for both games share a lot of members, and at one point during a Discord chat, someone suggested that they make a crossover game, where you’d find Link to the Past items in Super Metroid and vice versa.

#Super metroid randomizer download software#

This ‘Link to the Past + Super Metroid Crossover Randomizer’ was created by Thomas “Total” Backmark, 35, a software developer in Sweden, who told me in a recent interview that it all started as a joke. You can get the ROM hack, which launched today and requires you to upload your own ROMs of Zelda and Metroid, right here. In order to make progress, you’ll need to know what all of those words mean, which means you’ll need fairly comprehensive knowledge of both games. You might find Samus’s Morph Ball in Zelda‘s Misery Mire, while the Power Gloves could be stuck in a tunnel deep inside of Lower Norfair.

This, the spicier version, swaps the locations of every item in both Link to the Past and Super Metroid. This crossover hack is an extension of the Link to the Past Randomizer, which swaps the locations of every item in Hyrule, spicing up the game by forcing you to play everything out of order.

#Super metroid randomizer download download#

What might have once seemed like outlandish fanfiction is now a very real ROM hack that you can download and play, combining Zelda and Metroid into a single game. Whoops, you’ve just walked into Super Metroid. Suddenly you’re on Zebes, fighting aliens as a suited bounty hunter. Instead, the screen goes black for a few seconds. Imagine: You’re playing Link to the Past, the seminal Super Nintendo action-adventure game, and you walk into a fortune-teller’s house, where you’d expect to find a soothsayer taking rupees in exchange for hints.